Kilimanjaro's Glacial Retreat Confirms Warming

Glacier Loss Seen as Clear Sign of Human Role in Global Warming

By Andrew C. Revkin, The New York Times, Feb. 19, 2001

The icecap atop Mount Kilimanjaro, which for thousands of years has floated
like a cool beacon over the shimmering plain of Tanzania, is retreating at such
a pace that it will disappear in less than 15 years, according to new
studies.

The vanishing of the seemingly perpetual snows of Kilimanjaro that inspired
Ernest Hemingway, echoed by similar trends on ice-capped peaks from Peru to
Tibet, is one of the clearest signs that a global warming trend in the last 50
years may have exceeded typical climate shifts and is at least partly caused by
gases released by human activities, a variety of scientists say.

Measurements taken over the last year on Kilimanjaro show that its glaciers
are not only retreating but also rapidly thinning, with one spot having lost a
yard of thickness since last February, said Dr. Lonnie G. Thompson, a senior
research scientist at the Byrd Polar Research Center of Ohio State University.

Altogether, he said, the mountain has lost 82 percent of the icecap it had
when it was first carefully surveyed, in 1912.

Given that the retreat started a century ago, Dr. Thompson said, it is likely
that some natural changes were affecting the glacier before it felt any effect
from the large, recent rise in carbon dioxide and other heat- trapping
greenhouse gases from smokestacks and tailpipes. And, he noted, glaciers have
grown and retreated in pulses for tens of thousands of years.

But the pace of change measured now goes beyond anything in recent
centuries.

"There may be a natural part of it, but there's something else being
superimposed on top of it," Dr. Thompson said. "And it matches so many other
lines of evidence of warming.

Dr. Thompson presented the fresh data yesterday at the annual meeting of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco.

Other recent reports of changes under way in the natural world, like gaps in
sea ice at the North Pole or shifts in animal populations, can still be ascribed
to other factors, many scientists say, but many add that having such a rapid
erosion of glaciers in so many places is harder to explain except by global
warming.

The retreat of mountain glaciers has been seen from Montana to Mount Everest
to the Swiss Alps. In the Alps, scientists have estimated that by 2025 glaciers
will have lost 90 percent of the volume of ice that was there a century ago.
(Only Scandinavia seems to be bucking the trend, apparently because shifting
storm tracks in Europe are dumping more snow there.)

But the melting is generally quickest in and near the tropics, Dr. Thompson
said, with some ancient glaciers in the Andes — and the ice on Kilimanjaro —
melting fastest of all.

Separate studies of air temperature in the tropics, made using high- flying
balloons, have shown a steady rise of about 15 feet a year in the altitude at
which air routinely stays below the freezing point. Dr. Thompson said that other
changes could also be contributing to the glacial shrinkage, but the rising warm
zone is probably the biggest influence.

Trying to stay ahead of the widespread melting, Dr. Thompson and a team of
scientists have been hurriedly traveling around the tropics to extract cores of
ice from a variety of glaciers containing a record of thousands of years of
climate shifts. The data may help predict future trends.

The four-inch-thick ice cylinders are being stored in a deep-frozen archive
at Ohio State, he said, so that as new technologies are developed for reading
chemical clues in bubbles and water in ancient ice, there will still be
something to examine.

The sad fact, he said, is that in a matter of years, anyone wanting to study
the glaciers of Africa or Peru will probably have to travel to Columbus, Ohio,
to do so.

Dr. Richard B. Alley, a professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State
University, said the melting trend and the link — at least partly — to human
influence is "depressing," not only because of the loss of data but also because
of the remarkable changes under way to such familiar landscapes.

"What is a snowcap worth to us?" he said. "I don't know about you, but I like
the snows of Kilimanjaro."

The accelerating loss of mountain glaciers is also described in a scientific
report on the impact of global warming, which is being released today in Geneva
by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an influential network of
scientists advising world governments under the auspices of the United Nations.
The melting is likely to threaten water supplies in places like Peru and Nepal,
the report says, and could also lead to devastating flash floods.

Kilimanjaro, the highest point in Africa, may provide the most vivid image of
the change in glaciers, but, Dr. Thompson said, the rate of retreat is far
faster along the spine of the Andes, and the consequences more significant. For
25 years, he has been tracking a particular Peruvian glacier, Qori Kalis, where
the pace of shrinkage has accelerated enormously just in the last three
years.

From 1998 to 2000, the glacier pulled back 508 feet a year, he said. "That's
33 times faster than the rate in the first measurement period," he said,
referring to a study from 1963 to 1978.

In the short run, this means the hydroelectric dams and reservoirs downstream
will be flush with water, he said, but in the long run the source will run
dry.

"The whole country right now, for its hydropower, is cashing in on a bank
account that was built up over thousands of years but isn't being replenished,"
he said.

Once that is gone, he added, chances are that the communities will have to
turn to oil or coal for power, adding even more greenhouse gases to the air.

The changes in the character of Kilimanjaro are registering beyond the ranks
of climate scientists. People in the tourism business around the mountain and
surrounding national park are worried that visitors will no longer be drawn to
the peak once it has lost its glimmering cap.

Dr. Douglas R. Hardy, a geologist at the University of Massachusetts,
returned from Kilimanjaro last Thursday with the first yearlong record of
weather data collected by a probe placed near the summit.

Just before he left, he had a long conversation with the chief ranger of
Kilimanjaro National Park, who expressed deep concern about the trend. "That
mountain is the most mystical, magical draw to people's imagination," Dr. Hardy
said. "Once the ice disappears, it's going to be a very different place."

And the melting continues. When Dr. Hardy climbed the mountain to retrieve
the data, he discovered that the weather instruments, erected on a tall pole,
had fallen over because the ice around the base was gone.

TANZANIA: Kilimanjaro shows local costs of global
change

NAIROBI, 8 Nov 2001 (IRIN) - Mt Kilimanjaro in northern Tanzania could lose
its entire icecap by 2015, symbolising that global climate change "may be felt
first and hardest by the environment and people of Africa", the environmental
lobby group Greenpeace reported this week.

Ten years ago, glaciers covered most of the summit of Mt Kilimanjaro, the
Name of which derives from Kilima Njaro or "shining mountain" in Swahili.

According to some projections, almost the whole of Kilimanjaro's icecap could
vanish in the next 15 years if recession continues at the present rate, the NGO
said in a press release on Tuesday.

As environment ministers from around the world gathered in Morocco to
Finalize the Kyoto Protocol on mitigating global climate change, environmental
campaigners on Mt Kilimanjaro highlighted the risks to the environment and
livelihoods in northern Tanzania, and Africa in general.

Western industrialised nations were trying to ensure that the protocol was as
weak as possible in order to protect their atmosphere-polluting industries, but
catastrophes such as the loss of the icecap on Kilimanjaro were "the price
we pay if climate change is allowed to go unchecked", said Greenpeace campaigner
Joris Thijssen.

"Here in Africa, we will not only lose glaciers but will face more extreme
droughts and floods, widespread agriculture losses and increased infectious
diseases, all of which are felt most by people in developing nations," Thijssen
added.

Peaking at 5,895 metres, Kilimanjaro is the highest mountain in Africa and
home to at least 1,800 species of flowering plants and 35 of mammals. The
mountain is also a major source of water supply to some 5 percent of Tanzanians,
and up to one million people earn a living from it, either through
agriculture or the tourism industry, according to the United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP) in the capital, Dar es Salaam.

Scientists on Thursday warned that rising temperatures, linked with emissions
of greenhouse gases, could damage the ability of vital crops such as rice, maize
and wheat to seed themselves. Key cash crops in East Africa, such as coffee and
tea, would also be vulnerable to global warming in the coming decades, according
to a statement from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

"Poor farmers here [in East Africa] face declining yields and incomes in the
traditional coffee- and tea -growing areas, pushing them into even more
biting poverty," said executive director Klaus Toepfer.

That increased the fear of desperate farmers being forced into higher, cooler
mountainous areas, intensifying pressure on sensistive forests, threatening
wildlife and the quantity and quality of water, he said.

"This can only lead to environmental damage which, in turn, can lead to
increased poverty, hunger and ill-health," he added.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Tuesday reminded delegates at the climate
change conference in Morocco that the fight for a meaningful Kyoto treaty was
"not just an environmental issue" but "a fundamental development issue".

Mountain glaciers are sensitive indicators of climate change, and those at
tropical latitudes are particularly responsive. In November 1990, Kilimanjaro
was well flanked by glaciers on its southern And southwestern slopes, but these
receded alarmingly within a decade, as Detailed in photographs from space taken
by the crew of Space Shuttle mission STS-97 on 2 December last, Greenpeace
reported on Tuesday.

Ohio State University Prof Lonnie Thompson in February presented findings
that one-third of the ice field on Kilimanjaro had disappeared, or melted, over
the last 12 years, it said.

An estimated 82 percent of the icecap crowning Kilimanjaro when it was first
surveyed thoroughly in 1912 was now gone, and the ice had also thinned out by as
much as a metre in one area, it added.

In addition to climate change, encroachments around mountain resources
-through farming, grazing, gathering of fodder and commercial logging - have
resulted in increased levels of poverty for resident communities, according to
Nehemiah Murusuri of UNDP Tanzania.

Other major threats to Kilimanjaro include land degradation due to soil
erosion, littering by tourists and guides, and the shrinkage of its water
resources.

A project launched by the UNDP and the UN Foundation in September is intended
to benefit 20,000 people directly and 200,000 indirectly by involving the
communities who live around Mt Kilimanjaro in conserving the mountain and using
its resources in a sustainable manner.

However, community involvement in conservation of Mt Kilimanjaro at the micro
level will mean little if global climate change causes ecological loss on a
larger, devastating scale.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported earlier this year that
average global temperature could increase by up to six degrees Celsius over the
next 100 years, yet many ecosystems could tolerate a change of only two degrees
before risking unpredictable damage, Greenpeace reported on Tuesday.

"This is not just about losing beautiful landscapes. Climate changes affect
the whole ecosystem, and that means people's lives all around the globe," it
added.